Wyvern

I was very neutral about the game, and mostly continued playing it for nostalgia sake as it was something I played a lot years ago, but recently it has come to my attention that the game added a feature where you can swap cash currency (crowns) to have an AI image generator create a hall of fame image (custom character art for getting to level 25) for you. And I absolutely cannot support this. I'm out, I cannot recommend the game anymore, even for nostalgia.

There are 8 billion people on the planet and there are easily noticeable reasons only 1-4 of them will be online in this game at any given time, despite all the work that's gone into it for over 20 years. I started playing it recently during my Christmas break, and it took me the entire week to piece together why nobody was ever online in this seemingly amazing gem of a game. Online numbers will sometimes spike to 4 players when there's a Discord notification of a group event that takes place on average every 8 hours. Overall, the game is heavily balanced around the assumption that 100 players are online, with each player willing to tolerate toxic game design, which people don't need to put up with in 2026 because of how available online games are now. First off, good items are nearly unobtainable. This game uses an "dodge" and "slot" system where all normal equipment is randomly generated with up to 12% dodge chance and up to 2 resistance/offensive enchantment slots. This gear has been mega-nerfed to be almost impossible to find. I searched 10+ shops every hour for 3 days straight and didn't find any useful gear. That gear is required just to participate in any part of this game after 1-2 days of playing (Level 25). Second, almost every single "good" unique item in this game is not actually a good item. It's a weird trade-off to buff one thing while massively nerfing another. This is a theme in a lot of the game where players will work for a very long time to get something then it's like "+3 strength damage, -3 crit damage". The only exceptions to this rule are the items that were specifically designed for giants, because they get all the gear that is actually just good. For every other race, players get rushed to level 25 then they just hit a wall where they can't do anything but grind for 100-300 hours to get the required gear to continue leveling or go fight bosses. Some parts of the game seem like the developers were trying to balance them and they'd adjust it one way, then back a different way, then just keep building layers of adjustments until it got too complicated for the developers to handle and it resulted in a huge, convoluted mess. This ended up with giants being the strongest race by far, and mobs that are balanced for giants' HP and dwarves' resistances, but are almost a guaranteed kill against any other race that isn't wearing melee resistance rings (a forced meta that requires about a week of grinding per ring, per character). Much of the game is clearly balanced around players who have spent thousands of hours playing and collecting armors, and it gatekeeps new players from being able to play while also punishing those loyal players for putting so much effort into the game just to get nerfed. There is a clear culture of nerfing any play style that contributes to fun or success, which is super disrespectful to the veterans of the game who have put hundreds or thousands of hours in just to have the rug pulled out from under them once they finally achieve their goals (so they left), and super disrespectful to the newcomers who have the ladders pulled up from behind the others who got there first (so they left). Boss fights in this game offer low engagement with the exception of troll mechanics. The standard procedure is to stand next to it and hold down your healing button for 40 minutes to 2 hours depending on your character's power. You're unable to do anything else other than watch a movie irl or you'll die. The troll mechanics involve teleporting the boss or the players to random locations, "blinding" players which actually just completely blacks out the game window and makes the game unplayable, "cursing" their healing items (unicorn horns) so they can't even cure the blindness, removing potion-based resistances from players when they can't even find any gear to use instead, and cursing their "luck stones", which are a paid microtransaction item. "Sokoban" items: it takes around a hundred+ hours to gear a single character up to be able to fight just one of the four possible bosses (of which each has its own gear requirements), then it takes about an hour each time to save up money for healing and temporary resistance potions, then it takes at least half an hour to find a boss, then it takes at least 45 minutes to kill the boss while you must pay full attention or die, then there's about a 10% chance that the boss drops a Sokoban item, then there's about a 1/4 chance that it's even a Sokoban item that you can even use, then there's the chance that you can't even afford the item anyway, because after all of that, you have to actually buy it with "loot tokens" after the boss drops it. They could have solved all of this by giving each player a token each time they kill a boss and allowing the player to spend 2 tokens to buy their selected piece of Sokoban gear, pay 5 tokens for the first upgrade, and pay 10 tokens for the final upgrade. This would result in players needing to kill around 170 bosses on each character to get their full gear, and would give tons of content to each person while still allowing players to feel like gear is obtainable. I don't see the reason of putting so much content in the game if they're not even going to let players ever see that content. Microtransaction prices are balanced for the low player base, because if more players were around, they could charge $3-$10 per player instead of $10-$200. That would be fair because they need to host a server to provide the game with their current model of one official server and no player-hosted servers. However, the "luck stone" can very easily become "cursed" and not just rendered completely useless, but actually HARM the player's odds. Some classes aren't affected by that because they are either resistant to curses or able to remove the curses. However, other players in the game suffer massively for this "feature", despite having paid real money to acquire it. Also, the developers buffed multiplayer/multiple luck stones in boss fights and nerfed single luck stones, so again, the back-and-forth nerfing made it so that players are punished for having nobody online to play with. So when players can't do it by themselves, they log out, and then there's no "multiplayer" game anymore to claim the bonuses of teamwork. I hope one day the developers realize their mistakes and make the game more available to players and focus more on having fun and less on their twisted idea of "fair", because fun is what games are actually made for, and according to their "70,000 players" number in the game description, they've lost a lot of loyal fans because of their weird nerf culture. This game really has a ton of potential but these problems need to be fixed before I can really make any use of potential.

[quote][b]Warning: Third Party Account[/b] This game requires you to give your email address to the developers... there's no valid reason for this in a PC game when SteamWorks is available. This is often done to harvest private data and profile you, with potential sale and transmission of your private data to third parties. The developers will probably argue that you can trust them, but if they were trustworthy they wouldn't demand you create a third party account. This represents a considerable risk to gamers due to the privacy and security implications of developers that wish to bypass Steam and harvest user data. Remember, sometimes if the product is free, YOU are the product.[/quote] [quote][b][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction]Warning: In-Game Cash Shop[/url][/b] This game is infested with a toxic mobile app style cash shop. You will be prompted to and expected to give money/credit card details to the developers through this cash shop to buy in-game goods so you can play the game.[/quote] [quote][b]Note: Dead multiplayer game[/b] This game contains no meaningful single player content. There's no players, no populated servers. This multiplayer-only game cannot be played as intended.[/quote] WyvernRPG is an ancient 1990's Java based web-MUD (multi-user dungeon for you new kids), using classical RPG systems similar to games like Rogue/Hack/Ultima and so on... I guess the first thing to say is you can't go home again. Anyway someone got their hands on the source, exhumed the corpse and slapped a toxic cash shop into it, and tried to harvest people's emails and personal details. Creepy, isn't it? They mismanaged the game badly and now it's dead. Again. So, "Wyvern" is a dead multiplayer game. Why did it fail? It's video game autopsy time! The chief cause of failure is the developer thinking that their game will "go viral" without actually creating any reason for it do so. Competition amongst multiplayer centric games is extreme, and there's only a finite player base to appeal to. This game failed to reach any kind of critical mass and died as a result. Let's go into some of the reasons this particular game failed to appeal to gamers, despite the zero up front cost. The developers abandoned this 4 years and 10 months ago. It will never be completed. This unfinished game is just polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuinely, completely made games. Despite not being able to finish the game, the developers apparently had all the time in the world to build that fully functional cash shop, and financial transaction back-end system into the game. That shows the developers primary goal was just to set out to gouge cash from Steam gamers just like mobile devs do with mobile peasants. Visually, this has some fairly mediocre/dated looking graphics that will understandably be a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work. As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here. This is the part of the review where we need to ask gamers to keep a straight face. This garbage was made with Java, it's basically a 1990's browser/Flash game/Java applet that's been dumped here on Steam Direct, it's polluting the place with 1990's browser tier garbage, and that's a real problem. Don't laugh, they seriously thought it was okay to make a game with Java and publish it on Steam! That's right, this developer was trying to profit from this, they wanted your gamer money for a Java applet that someone else wrote, from 25 years ago. It's appalling, isn't it? This is a real nasty cash grab exploiting a once beloved game property, and that's not okay. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. All other issues aside (any of which would disqualify this from being worth your time), this is a game that relies on other players for it to be viable, and because there's not enough players, it's not viable. I can't recommend anyone downloads this, it's basically dead.

Things that need to change before Wyvern will be worth playing as a game, in order of importance: 1- The game needs to be playable as a single player before it will attract a community to make it playable as a multiplayer game. Too much of the content is unavailable to solo players. If I can't have fun when my friends aren't on why would I play at all? And if I've stopped playing, why would my friends play at all? 2- Developers need to stop spying on players and nerfing everything they find that the players enjoy. This game had a pretty strong revival almost a decade ago, and then the devs targeted the most active players of the community with nerfs. The devs think, "if they're doing it, it must be a cheap strategy," instead of, "if they're doing it, it must be fun". When your most active community members leave, the rest of the community follows. People care about feeling like they have a sense of privacy. Allowing your volunteers to spy on conversations, watch people play, and control their characters, all with 0 supervision or accountability, is weird and creepy. There are other games available where the devs don't act creepy, and games where they care about their game being fun. We all have jobs. We play games to have fun. 3- Players need to be able to trade items with each other, especially when they're offline. It's 2026. This game is ancient. There's no excuse anymore for it not having an economy or a proper trade system with how long it takes to find gear, and there's no excuse for blaming the players when they lose their auction items to a server crash. It's just laziness. I have 1000+ hours played on steam and another 2000+ on mobile, and even I don't have enough gear to have a playable character of each race because there is no economy and the rarity of items was balanced around the assumption that there would actually be one. 4- Luckstones are a real life money purchase and should always operate optimally. They should not be able to have their blessed status removed. 5- The rare Sokoban items and 2-slot agility items need to become more realistically obtainable. It's not fun spending 20-55 minutes holding down smart-heal to kill a boss for < 1% chance of getting the specific item I need when I could be playing a much more interactive game. Fix the system. Reduce boss HP and add an additional guaranteed Sokoban item to their drop. You're worried about Sokoban inflation when you should have been worried about your players quitting because they can't get any. Again, this has been a problem for years. This is part of point #1, making the game playable solo, so you actually have other players who want to come join them. 6- Stop making "trade-off" items that buff one skill but nerf another, and stop designing the game so players have to play it the way you imagine it should be played. If an item doesn't give agility, it's already a trade-off. If it doesn't give fear immunity or acid immunity, it's already a trade-off. The trade-off already exists in the things the item doesn't give; it doesn't need to also give crazy nerfs to other skills. Furthermore, if a player wants to play a certain way (e.g., building a hybrid character), that's what the player wants to do. If you don't let them, there are thousands of other games that will, and that's where all the old Wyvern players currently are. Rhialto specifically said the axeman guild should be a hybrid guild, then Dyana said "he doesn't play Wyvern and doesn't know what he's talking about" and made it "impossible" to build an axeman hybrid. Then I spent 6 weeks trying to do it anyway, and Rizato nerfed my new build too. If you don't even follow the game owner's declarations, nobody is going to trust you at all. 7- Troll mechanics are unfun. Bosses should be blinking, not teleporting. Blinking the players would also be ok. Teleporting them randomly across the map is not fun; it's annoying, especially when we're playing alone. Debuffing our potion resistances is currently set up with the assumption that players are able to find gear. It would be fine if that gear were actually obtainable. The way resistances currently work, many players would need 3-slot items, not 2-slot items. 8- There needs to be a massive shift in attitude and culture where the players stop thanking the devs for taking the time out of their year to make unannounced and undocumented changes to the game and instead the devs start appreciating the players for being there. If you don't have players you don't have a game. If that were understood back in 2017 maybe this game wouldn't have died, but the community got driven away by the devs. No other game thanks their devs for showing up once in a blue moon and nerfing everything they worked toward for the past several weeks. This is also the reason the wiki is dead. I'm not going to edit the wiki when it's going to get changed unannounced the next week, and I'm not going to edit the wiki when it just gives the wizards info of stuff they can nerf to ruin my fun. 9- Real-life purchase prices need to come down. You can charge $100 for game content and get 5 people buying it or you can charge $20 for game content and get 50 people buying it, and some of them buying it twice. There are too many features of the game being locked behind a paywall, but that wouldn't be a problem if the paywall didn't cost as much as a brand new AAA game. Nobody is attracted to those prices and it drives customers away and prevents repeat customers. 10- The arbitrary soulbinding of items needs to stop. It completely demotivates people to play your game when their achievements are either locked into their characters and can't be used once they decide to play a new character, or locked into their account and they can't sell anything good once they decide to switch up their play style (or your devs decide to completely nerf their build and their items are useless now on that character). Soulbinding is ok in some games, but actual thought goes into those decisions. It's not made on a whim. If slotted agility items become easier to find, Sokoban items drop more often, bosses get reduced HP, and luckstones always work, this game could be worth playing. Until then, nobody's going to waste 45 minutes finding and killing a boss by themselves in your game when they can play something else.

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This is a really old game from around 2002. It was a strange "Real-time Roguelike MMO." looking at the steam charts it seems like the developer put it on Steam, some players from back in the day came to check it out, then fell off and the game is dead and seemingly abandoned as there have only been about 2 average players for all of 2023. So yeah, a strange, but kind of charming little game from 20 years ago that is basically dead. Rest in peace Wyvern. <3

I played this game before it ever hit steam, a long long time ago: Back then, there was still a meta of melee resistance rings, dragonscale armours, etcetera. Heal spam was also a thing back then too; however, there were a lot of other ways to enjoy the game back then. After reading through the comments, I can see what types of players the steam version catered to. I have no idea whether there was a microtransaction concept once upon a time; I rather suspect not, as this game is essentially a MUD with some graphical elements. Running a server is likely incredibly cheap, especially with such a low online player count. I cannot imagine the current microtransaction costs are reasonable. As I understand it, microtransactions have to satisfy specific laws: game mechanics cannot "nerf" purchased items beyond expectations in some countries where this game is available. Having read through what many people have written, about luck stones being microtransaction-purchasable and *also* potentially detrimental after being cursed in game... this sounds like it is not merely dishonest, but illegal, game design. IDK who of the old devs got a hold of the IP. Honestly, this is a game listed as being in early access, with the last update made 4 years ago. Avoid like the plague. You won't get the nostalgia kick you were hoping for, I can promise you that.

An old school style RPG that gets back to the basics. Skills that are more relatable to tabletop rpg and strongly text based combat.

I would give this a neutral rating if i could, its just not the game for me but there are some problems so I'll list them. Very clunky UI , UX and controls, you get used to it or rebind it but the new player experience is terrible , why put up with it when you can play something else ? This visually looked like tales of maj eyal but I just couldn't enjoy this game.